A Ringing Payphone

I started collecting sounds of payphones, and I shall begin sharing this ongoing collection with a signal rarely-heard today: the chirping, synthetic sound of a ringing payphone.

An interesting thing about this particular payphone heard in this sample is that it accepts incoming calls, but with a catch: the person who answers the phone must deposit 25¢ to be able to talk to the caller. This makes sense to me, since without that measure a payphone can only lose money for the time it is in use for an incoming call.
Few payphones these days accept incoming calls, and those that do usually only ring a small number of times before going to the internal modem. The modem does nothing but end the incoming call, thus saving wear and tear on the payphone’s ringer. The volume of the ringing sound is usually very faint, making it unlikely that a passer-by would hear a ringing payphone on a busy street.

Long ago, when this site first came to be, my stated purpose was to facilitate random contacts among strangers by collecting lists of payphone numbers and encouraging people to call them. Over time that focus changed, and coincidentally fewer and fewer payphones accepted incoming calls anyway, though I still hear that siren sound once in a while and I will pick up a ringing payphone if I can get to it in time. The conversations are usually pretty colorful, though I have hung up on callers when it appeared I was talking to a blogger or media producer mining for content or some kind of gotcha programming.

I have not done sound production for a long time, but I had not forgotten how long it can take to get a decent sound sample, especially outdoors. From start to finish this single sample, which lasts about 17 seconds, took over 4 hours to get, and there is still room for improvement. Other payphone sounds took surprisingly long to satisfactorily document. In another endeavor I recently created a 3-second sound piece which took 7 hours to produce.

I expect to share more payphone sounds, including the sound of a rotary dial being used on what I know to be a very rare, fully-functional rotary dial payphone. I should also grab general phone sounds from any type of phone, not just payphones. I think that in time these sounds will vanish from our world, with the dial tone itself lingering only in its use as a dramatic telephone-call-ending effect in movies and television.